Featured Videos

Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the dysfunctions of the industry? Why does that industry warrant starting a new company?

Ricky Joshi: You basically had four manufacturers who controlled 81% of the market. Majority of them were public companies. The average margins of manufacturers is around 40%. On top of that, you have distribution companies that take a percentage of the profit. Then you have retailers, which are also public companies. At the end of the day, a mattress that costs $500 would go to retail for $3,500 or more because of so many parties involved. We cut all that out. We’re not branded manufacturers. Because of the structure of the industry, you end up in a situation where there’s benefit to collusion. Different retailers will request proprietary products. What ends up happening is they’ll just change the stitch and call it a proprietary product.

>>>

Building an Internet of Things Platform Company from Zaragoza, Spain: Alicia Asin, CEO of Libelium (Part 1)

Spain, as you know, is in a terrible economic mess. Entrepreneurs like Alicia are vital to the country’s economic future. She has built a steady, cutting edge technology company with 60+ people from Zaragoza. Impressive!

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your beginning. Where were you born? Where did you grow up and in what kind of background?

Alicia Asin: I was born in Zaragoza, Spain. I went to the University of Zaragoza. This is where I met David Gascon my co-founder. We founded Libelium. We’ve been always tied to the same location. In fact, starting a new business gave us the motivation of staying in our city. It was like a rebel act of saying, “It has to be possible to be high tech in a city like ours.”

>>>

Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the business idea that you were playing with at that point?

Trevor Traina: The business became Compare.net.

Sramana Mitra: Comparative shopping online?

Trevor Traina: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking about now?

Trevor Traina: 1996.

Sramana Mitra: What happened? How did that go?

Trevor Traina: At that time, all of the web tools were focused on price comparison. It was the era of the shopping box.
>>>

Bootstrapping a $25 Million E-Commerce Company: Saatva Co-Founder Ricky Joshi (Part 1)

I have spoken with many VCs who are looking or e-commerce companies that can scale at venture pace, which is hard to achieve. On the other side of the spectrum, however, the bootstrapped e-commerce companies are going gangbusters! Saatva is one such and a terrific company.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with your personal back story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Ricky Joshi: I was born in Columbus, Ohio. I went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. I was very involved in the entrepreneurial scene there. I actually helped start the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network, which is now the flagship entrepreneurial program at Dartmouth. I started my first company at school. >>>

Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about what made that a successful transition? What did you do as a founder? What did your new CEO do as the incoming CEO? Obviously, it has been a successful transition since you’re working with this person for a while.

Ross Mason: A few things. Bringing someone new in is always a risk and a challenge. It’s not just the CEO but it’s the team around the CEO as well that really matters. He used to work at SpringSource and the CEO of SpringSource was a friend of mine. This was an open source company around the Spring framework that had a pretty good exit. Rod, the CEO at SpringSource recommended Greg. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur Building a Luxury Business: Trevor Traina, CEO of IfOnly (Part 1)

Trevor has built several businesses and is now working in a segment that he naturally aligns with—luxury experiences.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?

Trevor Traina: I was born and raised in San Francisco. On my father’s side, I’m a fourth-generation San Franciscan.

Sramana Mitra: Wow! That’s a rarity around here.

Trevor Traina: Yes it is. I was here through high school. Then, I went to Princeton for my undergraduate studies. Then I went immediately to Oxford to St. Catherine’s College where I got a graduate degree in Social Studies. Then I worked in New York for three years.
>>>

Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have drivers that a lot of people need that you’re making significant business out of? Have you seen that?

Ross Mason: We certainly see clusters around certain SaaS applications. Obviously, Salesforce is leading the charge on enterprise. They really opened up that market. As such, we have a very strong relationship with Salesforce on many levels. We partner with them and they’ve also invested in us as a company. We work very closely with their field teams and even their product teams on helping drive more value to the product they’re bringing to the market by unlocking the data inside the organization.

To give you an example, when Salesforce announced Wave, we were one of the strategic partners there to drive data into their new Wave data analytics platform. >>>

Unicorn in The Making: Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: During this period when you had a lot of users and you didn’t have the model figured out, what experiments did you run to get to the heart of that issue—because the whole business is predicated upon that?

Ross Mason: No one has ever asked me that question and it’s a great question. I like it because we did have to experiment. We might be doing somewhere in the region of $4 million in revenue. It shows promise but we weren’t showing growth. Then the financial market crash got everyone spooked. Some of the analysts were saying, “The model was potentially going to harm our business because people were buying us but doing big architectures like SOA.” We really had to play around with it. What we did was started looking, very early on, at application ecosystems and what was changing there.

Even in 2007, we tried to do Mule On Demand. Salesforce is becoming very interesting, not just as a CRM, but as a way of delivering applications. We started toying around with the idea and that started to shape other things such as the way we would deliver connectors for applications within the cloud. Between the years 2009 to 2010 was when we realized that what we should be doing was to harness the changes that the cloud was bringing to market. >>>